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Federal officials plan to go over the head of the state Health Department after it rejected calls by federal, state and local elected officials to reconsider conducting a health study of people who live or have lived near the toxic Dewey Loeffel dump outside the southern Rensselaer County village of Nassau.

In a Dec. 31 letter, Nathan Graber, director of the state Center for Environmental Health, said there is no need for such a study around the 16-acre, six decade-old unlined dump, which contains about 46,000 pounds of PCBs, solvents and other toxic chemicals from General Electric Co., the former Schenectady International (now SI Group) and Bendix Corp.

"Based on information gathered to date and from reviews conducted over many years, the department does not support a recommendation for a study of health outcomes among the general population near the landfill," Graber wrote to Rensselaer County legislative Chairman Martin Reid and two county lawmakers, Alexander Shannon and Judith Breselor.

U.S. senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand plan to ask federal health officials to step in. The senators are "planning a joint letter to officials at Health and Human Services and other relevant federal agencies in pursuit a full examination of the site, considering the known toxins and local health concerns," said Gillibrand spokesman James Rahm on Friday.

"We are disappointed by the state Department of Health's refusal of our appeal, but remain hopeful the health study that is needed will be ordered," said Shannon.

The dump operated from 1952 to 1970, when the site was closed by court order after toxic leaks were discovered. Cleaning the dump has been fraught with problems and delays since 1968, when the state ordered a cleanup amid reports of fires, leaks and poisoned farm animals.

The state took over the project in 1980, capped the landfill, and remained responsible until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took over in 2011 under the national Superfund pollution cleanup program. A water treatment plant to cleanse toxins that are leaking into the groundwater is set to open this month.

An underground plume of tainted water from the dump extends about 2,500 feet south toward Central Nassau Road and contains benzene and tricholoroethylene, a type of industrial solvent and a known carcinogen. PCB and other pollution has spread to nearby Valatie Kill, Nassau Lake and Kinderhook Lake in Columbia County. PCB-tainted fish from those bodies of water have been listed by the state as unsafe to eat since 1980.

This is the state's second rejection of a health study in less than two months. In November, the state Health Department and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said a health study was unnecessary, based in part on a 2002 state review that found a decade's worth of cancer rates around the dump were not elevated compared to the rest of the state.

There were "no new environmental data or public health findings that indicate further work is warranted at this time," that report concluded. The earlier study looked at cancer rates from 1989 to 1998 in three ZIP codes around the dump — 12123 (Nassau), 12063 (East Schodack) and 12062 (East Nassau).

In his letter, Graber wrote that the cancer study was not the reason the state sees a health study as unwarranted. "Rather, this conclusion was based on the exposure and health evaluations ... which indicated the general population residing near the landfill had not experienced unusually high levels of exposures to contaminants and the nearby population was not expected to experience health effects related to the site. In responding to residents' concerns about cancer, the department often has to reiterate that, unfortunately, cancer is very common."

David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, said the state's position contradicts the EPA decision to add the dump to the Superfund program. Carpenter has called the November state and federal report "very unsatisfactory and incomplete," warning that the landfill "continues to pose a direct threat to human health of nearby residents" and that its plume of underground pollution "continues to move."